Data:
The owner, Natalie was looking for a part time analyst to initial her costing optimizes project. It's a task starting from scratch. All she had were original paper invoices. They are so raw to be digitized, grouped and organized into a manner to be analysed. My first step was to set up an Excel framework and act on data entry. When more and more data were gathered, I had a basic shape for how to forecast the cost growth ratio. This is also the initial stage that vendor and production management concept is identified. Gathering meaningful data paves the way to success.
Model:
The second task was to build a sales number tracking model. Natalie has very good mindset. Her goal is to launch the online ordering and sales tracking tool. However, there is no maturated data to support yet. In a good office talk, we agreed with the spreadsheet framework. There were trials and errors in several iterations, multiple meetings and email exchanges, before the formulated model was finalized. Considering to simply the daily operational process, I tried to use sets of fomulas such as IF or SUMIFS, as much as possible, and created hyper links for navigation. In my view, the most important thing is traceability, so that my successor can put hands on quickly.
Sweet:
This is an excellent part-time job experience. I learned how to communicate my thoughts in words and numbers. More than that, I learned from Natalie, how she organizes her work, leads a small team, communicates with clients, and deals with trouble vendors. I admired her courage and vision to run small business. Like many of us, she also needs to take care of family and especially, her new born baby.
Spice:
The office is far from where I live. I used to come a long distance to meet and talk, although we communicated mostly by emails. Sometimes there is delay and confusion. For the concern of commute, I finally declined her full time job offer.
New ideas are always in need to solve challenges. When looking back, I realized that better solution on presenting financial data in a slick term called 'data visualization'. That should make the whole model easy to build and follow. I am on my way to achieve goals.
